AT&T

The iPhone 5 is selling at retail stores today to millions of people who are obviously wealthy. After all an unlocked 64GB model which is unlocked runs $849! Some people are so bent out of shape about how much money Apple is making from the launch of this phone, they are protesting.

While most of the world is focusing on Apple, what may be interesting to note is in India there is a new and usable tablet which starts at just $35. As Gary Kim points out, the DataWind Aakash UbiSlate 7Ci is a super-cheap tablet that will attempt to connect every student in India to the Internet.

The tablet has a 7.5 inch display, a front facing camera and surfs the web about as fast as an iPhone - probably not as fast as the iPhone 5 though.

Nortel’s bankruptcy some years back was due to a host of reasons including price competition from the likes of ZTE and Huawei. Consider that while the world’s telecom equipment manufacturers were acquiring companies during a growing telecom bubble, these two stood back and focused more on imitating the best technology they could find instead of making inflated purchases in the billions of dollars.

But China is a communist/capitalist mish mosh and as such national interests can drive it to do whatever it takes to win in international markets. This is why EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht is pushing a trade case against these telecom giants who are said to be receiving state subsidies in order to undercut European rivals.

Some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd has turned its attention to Apple and its roll out of the iPhone 5. After all, this evil company decided to take on the two largest phone makers non-US based Nokia and RIM, and make them irrelevant in less than half a decade. Moreover, these disciples of Satan from Cupertino had the gall to have their stock increase by hundreds of billions of dollars and in the process help hundreds of thousands of investors including people holding IRAs, 401Ks, and those who benefit from pension funds like school teachers, firefighters, policemen and legions of other union and non-union workers.

One occupy protester, Shiloh Coral (above) said it best when she explained that instead of enriching Apple and the consumer culture it benefits from, we should invest in education and helping low-income families.

There's been lots of activity in the TMC newsroom with many new guests coming to our Norwalk, CT studio to tell us what is new and exciting at their companies.

At around 170 million mobile subscribers, TeliaSonera is a major mobile carrier supplying much of Eastern Europe and Russia. Ivo Pascucci of TeliaSonera discussed how his area of the company company differentiates itself in the wholesale carrier market. Services include wave services, collocation and wholesale IP transit for carriers, content providers and gaming companies.

From there Joe Gillette from cloud communications provider and NY-based Stage2 Networks told me about the company’s thoughts on hosted voice services.

Apple is said to be getting into the music streaming business and there’s a chance we’ll hear more about it at the iPhone 5 launch event next week. As you may recall I surmisedApple would get into the home streaming market when it purchased LaLa in December of 2009. At the time I thought they would likely compete with Sonos and moreover mentioned there would be obvious implications for Pandora and the rest of the group.

Integration with iOS and possible tight links with iTunes were some of the areas of differentiation I pointed out we may see.

Amazon has shown the world it is possible to compete against the iPad if you offer a smaller device and charge a lot less for it. When the Kindle Fire was released it cost $199 while the equivalent WiFi-only iPad cost $499.

Since that time, Apple has released the New iPad with a Retina Display at $499 and the iPad 2 saw its price drop to $299.

Now, Amazon has taken a page out of the Apple book and dropped the price of the Kindle Fire to an impossibly low $159.

I read with interest news from the Business Insider touting the Super WiFi Market as a huge thing for 2013. I agree of course since TMC and its partner Crossfire Media have been running the Super WiFi Summit for a number of years now and it is growing nicely.

I have always believed white space technology has the potential to be the most disruptive technology ever. Think about how IP communications disrupted telephony and imagine Super WiFi doing the same thing for wireless data. Of course the technologies in my comparisons are very different but the disruption potential is similar.

I like to see myself as the glass is half-full kind of person but I really try to be realistic so yes, sometimes it is one-half empty. And the two sides are tearing at each other as the news breaks regarding hotel Wifi. You see there is huge news as Accor Hotels which has in its portfolio the Sofitel, Novitel, Ibis and Mercure brands has decided to make all its WiFi at its hotels free.

This is a major hotel chain and global at that – some of the company’s hotels in fact play in markets where the charges are as high as £8.50 (13 dollars) an hour!

No doubt this move will be followed by other chains who will fear losing customers.